Treatery/Trickery

• By Alison
• 1 November, 2009
• Comments Off on Treatery/Trickery

Trick or Treat is an American tradition, like Thanksgiving. But unlike Thanksgiving, Trick or Treat has also become a bit of a UK favourite too. That’s because Thanksgiving involves turkey, which to be honest we get enough of at christmas and pumpkin pie which somehow involves buying vegetables in a tin. Whereas Trick or Treat involves candy, with the optional extra of throwing eggs at your neighbour’s houses. How can you resist with that appeal?

Where we live it’s all families because of the catchment area rule in the UK, so we pretty much have a Trick or Treating loop around the two parallel streets. It always ends up as some sort of like a conga line of children with their trailing adults merging into larger groups then dispersing again as they change direction. Adults often get half way down the street before they reaslise that they are ushering two completely unrelated witches before them, at which point they have start calling out for their real offspring like plaintive mother birds. “Witches switches” are made between families, and the ritual starts again.

Occasionally a family will arrive home with an extra witch. For this reason it’s a good idea to sharpie your mobile number up your child’s arm so that they can be relocated after the event. Or an excellent chance to get rid of one that’s getting on your nerves, by sharpying the wrong number…

Mine love halloween. They look forward to it from they day after the previous years. We’ve developed a bit of a ritual with our friends. We all go over to one friend’s house to begin the assault on the neighbourhood, and afterward return to have hot dogs and wine. The kids don’t need the wine, they have sweets that produce pretty much the same sophorific effect. it’s a wonderful chance for them to get so wound up on sweets and hotdogs that they virutally implode and fall out with all of their friends, then go home crying that they didn’t actually want to go home.

We spent most of the afternoon getting ready for the event. Miss Trouble Pants wanted to go as a zombie, replete with crosses over her eyes to indicate that she was dead. I took that advice and ignored it, creating this instead:

Feeling quite pleased with that effort!

Miss Comic Relief wanted to go as a witch. That one is easy, simply dress her up in my black clothes and paint her face green. We don’t do pink frilly witches in our house, thankyou very much. Trying to get her to scowl for the photo was nearly impossible though.

While I took the girls out trick or treating, Mr Boxer Shorts hid at home with the lights off, since we’d not planned to be at home, and so hadn’t stocked up on candy. Apparently giving out satsuma’s is not regarded as a treat. Ingrates. Last year we ended up with egg all over the door because we were not home, but this year was relatively uneventful in that regard.

When we arrived home with two tired out children we couldn’t put them straight to bed however, because with all the talc and hair gel, green and white facepaint, they had to be doused and scrubbed in the shower. This wasn’t really the highlight of the night, as there were some disagreements at this point. They thought I was washing too roughly, and I thought I wasn’t. I’m bigger, I win.

Finally they were tucked up in bed, dark eyes and green ears still evident due to a less than successful facewashing! I am not sure whether the whole night is really a treat or a trick for us to be honest! But they had fun.